Infrastructuring
for Cultural
Commons
Sanna Marttila
Infr
astructuring
for Cultur
al Commons
Sanna Mar
ttila
Infrastructuring for
Cultural Commons
Aalto ARTS Books Helsinki, Finland shop.aalto.fi
Supervising professor: Lily Díaz-Kommonen, Aalto University
Thesis advisors: Dr. Andrea Botero, University of Oulu and Professor Erling Björgvinsson, University of Gothenburg
Preliminary examiners: Professor Luigina Ciolfi, Sheffield Hallam University and Assistant professor Maurizio Teli, The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute Opponent: Professor Dagny Stuedahl, Oslo and Akershus University College of
Applied Sciences © Sanna Marttila
Graphic design: Emmi Kyytsönen
Materials: Munken Pure 120 g and 300g and Munken Lynx 120 g ISBN 978-952-60-7778-9 (printed) ISBN 978-952-60-7779-6 (pdf) ISSN 1799-4934 ISSN 1799-4942 (electronic) Unigrafia Helsinki 2018
Infrastructuring for
Cultural Commons
Sanna Marttila
Acknowledgements 6 Abstract 10
Original articles 12
Note on co-authored articles 13
1. Introduction 15
1.1 Research area and theoretical stances 17
1.2 Identifying and addressing gaps in practice and literature 20 1.3 Research focus, stance and questions 27
1.4 Summary of the cases and research articles 30 1.5 Contributions and relevance of the research 33 1.6. Structure of the dissertation 34
2. Theoretical foundations: participatory design,
infrastructuring and cultural commons 41
2.1 Towards open-ended participatory design 42
2.2 Building on the notions of information infrastructures and infrastructuring 48 2.2.1 Infrastructuring 52
2.2.2 Two notions of a growing infrastructure: installed base and gateway 57 2.3 Building on the notions of cultural commons and commoning 59
2.3.1 Different commons research traditions 60 2.3.2 Cultural and creative commons 63 2.3.3 Commoning 67
2.4 Politics, publics and infrastructuring for cultural commons 70
3. Constructing the field:
Research context, design, methodology and cases 75
3.1 Backdrop: Digital convergence of cultural heritage institutions in Europe 76 3.2 Locating politics of access 84
3.3 Design methodology: constructing designerly enquiry 90 3.4 Participatory research methodology 95
3.5 Research design and selection of cases 107
3.6 Design research cases: Fusion, EUscreen and AvoinGLAM 111
3.6.1 The Fusion system for facilitating everyday media practices of communities 113 3.6.2 EUscreen – access to institutional audiovisual cultural heritage 119
3.6.3 AvoinGLAM – an open cultural movement 127 3.7 Reflecting upon the research design 140
4. Summary of the research articles 147
4.1 Collaborative design of a software toolkit 148 4.2 How copyrights complicate media design 151 4.3 Co-creating a commons culture 154
4.4 Co-designing and collective infrastructuring of
two information Infrastructures for digital cultural heritage 156 4.5 Situating co-design 158
4.6 Commons Design, infrastructuring and commoning in PD 161
5. Infrastructuring for cultural commons 165
5.1 Infrastructuring strategies 165
5.1.1 Probing and building upon the installed base 168
5.1.2 Stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways 175 5.1.3 Producing and pooling shared resources 183
5.2 Fostering and shaping a commons culture 188 5.2.1 From rules-in-use to cultures-in-use 190 5.2.2 Price of participation? 193
5.2.2 Common language, shared narratives and articulation 194 5.3 Initial design principles for commons design 197
6. Conclusions 205
Bibliography 212
Acknowledgements
A large amount of colleagues, friends and family members have contributed to this doctoral dissertation and kept me sane throughout. Their generous support and help has made this journey possible.
First and foremost, I would like to extend my gratitude and appreciation to my advisors Andrea Botero and Erling Björgvinsson, who took over the project when encouragement was greatly needed. I was very much privileged to learn from these two outstanding scholars. Their caring and critical guidance is the biggest gift any-one could receive. Gracias Andrea for taking this bumpy road with me, and espe-cially for being a good (and always fun and sarcastic) friend!
I am very grateful to the pre-examiners Maurizio Teli and Luigina Ciolfi who took the time to engage with my work, and provided critical insights on and valu-able suggestions for the dissertation.
Without Arki research group my academic journey would have never started. The largest of all possible thanks is to Kari-Hans Kommonen, who invited me to
join Arki, and has continued to inspire and offer support to me throughout this long journey.
The thesis would not have come to a successful completion without the love and friendship of colleagues Kati Hyyppä, Joanna Saad-Sulonen and Mariana Salgado – who together with Andrea form the Arki Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios.
Thank you, ladies, for making the research work fun and enjoyable, and teaching me the power of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
My former colleagues, Ramyah Gowrishankar, Joonas Juutilainen, Anne Luo-tonen, Lauri Kainulainen, Arto Kellokoski, Mia Muurimäki, Aapo Rista, Tommi Raivio, Jenna Sutela, Ville Tikkanen, Jani Turunen, Sanna Vilmusenaho and
Kris-7
tine Visanen have all extended their support in very many ways in the design re-search projects, and I learned a lot from them. The same goes for my fellow Doctor of Arts travellers, especially my early fellow travellers in pursuing openness Petri Kola, Juha Kronqvist and Andrew Gryf Paterson.
I wish to thank professor Lily Díaz for carrying out the practical supervision of my doctoral research. Many faculty members of Media Lab have been kind enough to extend their help at various phases of this doctoral research, especially I wish to thank Anna Arsniva, Philip Dean, Ilpo Kari, Teemu Leinonen, Tarmo Toikkanen, Mika Lumi Tuomola, Pekka Salonen and Rasmus Vuori.
I am also very much indebted to my hosts in various research environments. A special mention to Pelle Ehn, Jonas Löwgren, Bo Reimer, Elisabet M. Nilsson,
Per-Anders Hillgren, Anna Seravalli, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, and Richard Topgaard, and to other people in former Medea at Malmö University. Staying at Medea was a career-changing opportunity to do my research with you and in your facilities. The intellectual and political frame you presented me with had a great impact on my research and design activities. I am also indebted to my hosts, Shin Mizukoshi in the University of Tokyo, and fabulous Lone Malmborg in the IT University of Copenhagen. And to the distributed practitioner and academic com-munity of the P2P-FUSION and EUscreen research projects, who have given me the generous gift of sharing their expertise.
During my work pursuing openness in the cultural heritage sector I have been fortunate to collaborate with and learn from many outstanding profession-als. Thank you to the AvoinGLAM working group, to the Open Cultural Data Master Class participants for generously challenging and sharing expertise with
me. Thanks to all the participants of Hack4Fi – Hack for heritage! Special thanks to the power dream team Neea Laakso and Laura Sillanpää who made all these efforts possible. I greatly appreciate your friendship, and I hope we can do many more projects in the future. The great minds of the Open Knowledge Finland community have been a longstanding source of support, encouragement and ad-vice. I am also very grateful for numerous peers in the international OpenGLAM and Creative Commons communities, which both had an outstanding importance for my research.
My journey of writing the doctoral dissertation has not been a traditional one. When the doctoral project has not been my main (or paid) profession, it has meant that I have had to borrow time from the shared time from my family and friends. Evenings, weekends and holidays have too often been occupied by my writing (or stressing about writing). Thank you all, dear friends, for your invaluable support and bearing with me, and staying in my life despite me being too often absent, or absent minded. Special thanks to the University of Oulu Humanistas ladies for laying the foundation for academic curiosity and the art of debating with passion and friendship.
The last but not least, heartfelt thank you to my family. I am very grateful to my parents Ulla and Hannu for their support and encouragement in my life, and unconditional love. I would also want to thank my brother Juha, and to my other family members in Finland and Denmark who have supported me along the way.
I met my partner Rune just when I had started my doctoral studies. Together with him, and because of him, I have learned to be a researcher. Rune opened me to a new world critical thinking and writing. Without cutter-Karhu this disserta-tion would not have ever finished. I owe it all to you Rakas Toveri. I hope you hold my hand forever!
Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift. Creativity and the artist in the modern world (1979) writes that “a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation” (p. xix) – the gift must always move (p. 4). I hope to keep the invaluable gifts moving, and to be able to pass on the
Abstract
In this doctoral dissertation, I inquire into the ways in which Participatory Design (PD) and digital design endeavors can contribute to wider public access to, and use of, digital cultural heritage. I advocate for an approach according to which digital cultural heritage is arranged and understood as cultural commons, and for more collaborative modes of social care for and governance of the commons.
In addition to the empirically grounded findings and proposals contained in six individual research articles, I develop a theoretical framework that combines scholarship on Information Infrastructures, Commons and PD. Against this framework I interrogate how the information infrastructures and conditions that surround digital cultural heritage can be active in constructing and contributing to cultural commons. While doing this, I draw attention to the gap that exists between on the one hand official institutional digital cultural heritage collections, systems and practices, and on the other hand the digital platforms and practices through which everyday people create, curate and share digital cultural works. In order to understand how to critically and productively bridge this gap, I present insights gained from conducting three design research cases that engage both cul-tural heritage institutions and everyday media users. Building upon this empirical work, and latching on to scholarship on the notion of infrastructuring, I propose four infrastructuring strategies for cultural commons: probing and building upon the installed base, stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways, producing and pooling shared resources, and, lastly, fostering and shaping a com-mons culture that supports commoning.
AbstrAct 11
In exploring these strategies, I map the territory between commons and infra-structuring, and connect these notions to the PD tradition. I do so to sketch the design principles for a design orientation, commons design. I assert that these prin-ciples can be useful for advancing PD, and can inform future initiatives, aid in identifying infrastructural challenges, and in finding and confirming an orienta-tion to participatory design activities.
Drawing on my practical design work, I discuss requirements for professional designers operating on commons frameworks and with collective action. By doing this, my dissertation not only breaks new theoretical ground through advancing theoretical considerations relevant to contemporary design research, especially the field of PD, but also contributes practical implications useful for professional digi-tal media design practice, especially for designers working in the fields of digidigi-tal culture and cultural heritage.
Original articles
Article 1.
Marttila, Sanna, Hyyppä, Kati & Kommonen, Kari-Hans. (2011). “Co-Design of a Software Toolkit for Media Practices: P2P-Fusion Case Study”, New Media Technologies and User Em-powerment. Jo Pierson, Enid Mante-Meijer and Eugène Loos (Eds.). Peter Lang - Interna-tional Academic Publishers, USA.
Article 2.
Marttila Sanna & Botero Andrea. (2013). “The ‘Openness Turn’ in Co-Design. From Usability, Sociability and Designability Towards Openness”. In Co-create 2013, the boundary-crossing conference on Co-design in Innovation. Espoo, Finland: Aalto University. p. 99–110.
Article 3.
Marttila, Sanna & Hyyppä, Kati. (2014b). “Rights to Remember? How Copyrights Complicate Media Design”. In Proceedings 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (NordiCHI’14), ACM, Oct. 2014.
Article 4.
Marttila Sanna, Botero Andrea & Saad-Sulonen, Joanna. (2014). “Towards commons design in participatory design”. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts - Volume 2.
Article 5.
Marttila, Sanna. (2016). “From Rules in Use to Culture in Use – Commoning and Infrastructur-ing Practices in an Open Cultural Movement”. In ProceedInfrastructur-ings of the Design Research Society Conference 2016. Design + Research + Society. Future-Focused Thinking.
Article 6.
Marttila, Sanna. & Botero, Andrea. “Infrastructuring for Cultural Commons”. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2017) 26: 97.
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Note on co-authored articles
Article 1 is an article written together with Kati Hyyppä and Kari-Hans Kommonen. As the main author I set the topic and structure of the article. Hyyppä, who was part of the co-design process in Fusion, contributed in writing to the parts describing the co-design communities and their activities. As principal investigator of the project Kommonen contributed with comments to the whole article, and contributed in writing to the conclusions and future work sections of the article.
Article 2 I co-wrote together with Andrea Botero. I was the main author and responsible for setting the approach, topic and structure for the article. Botero particularly contributed to the development of the concluding table that summarizes the co-design turns, and contributed with comments during the whole writing process.
Article 3 was written in collaboration with Kati Hyyppä. The article presents findings from a survey that Hyyppä and I carried out together. I was the main author and responsible for the topic, approach and frame of the article. Hyyppä is responsible for the co-design section of Vir-tual Exhibition builder. Hyyppä also provided valuable comments and feedback to the overall article and its findings.
Article 4 is written in collaboration with Andrea Botero and Joanna Saad-Sulonen. The pa-per is one of the outcomes of our collaborative work on commons and its relation to Participa-tory Design. As the main author, I set the approach and structure of the paper. We wrote the introduction and conclusions of the article together.
Article 6 was written together with Andrea Botero. As the main author, I developed the con-ceptual and theoretical framing of the article. I was responsible for writing Case 2, and contrib-uting to Case 1 that Botero co-wrote with me. Botero contributed to the theoretical framework chapter, especially to the infrastructure and infrastructuring sections. She also contributed with comments throughout the writing process.
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1. Introduction
Our history is a vital part of our future. Access to our cultural heritage, which has been passed down by previous generations, is a key to explaining and exploring our shared past. In the past decades, much has changed about how people can access cultural heritage and engage with it. One such change is the technological advancements and associated social practices that have enabled cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, to digitize their holdings. In tandem with how the digital age has affected the tools used by cultural heritage institutions, digitization has changed the ways in which people can participate in the creation, production and distribution of digital culture.
New capabilities have given heritage institutions possibilities for storing and sharing our common culture and history by creating digital reproductions and copies of cultural objects and artefacts, such as electronic archival records, paint-ings, maps and audiovisual materials. Earlier, these holdings had to be kept locked away in closed storage facilities with only limited professional access and often absolutely no access for the public. Starting from pilot projects and experiments in the 1990s, large-scale conservation and digitization initiatives are nowadays main-stream among cultural heritage institutions. Along with these advancements, the digital age has brought constant change, uncertainty and pressure to the herit-age institutions on two main fronts. First, to develop and maintain, together with other institutions, joint access-points and interfaces for digitized cultural heritage and data online. This cross-border collaboration has blurred the boundaries be-tween different institutions and affected their core professional practices (Rayward 1998, Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt and Aljas 2009). Second, the digitization of cultural heritage creates demands for institutions to offer wider means for their diverse
au-diences and general public to engage with the growing body of digital collections. Inviting people to interact with the digital collections could enable new channels and means for enjoying and experiencing culture and history, and could encourage appropriation and creative re-use of these collections by various sectors of society. At the same time, it requires the institutions to acquire new expertise and skills.
In the same period as these institutional efforts to digitize cultural heritage and create wider public access to digital collections have taken place, social media plat-forms and countless digital tools have been booming on the Internet, and people have developed new ways of participating in the production and distribution of digitized expressions of culture (Jenkins 2006, Benkler 2002, 2006, Bauwens 2009). In the current media landscape, where people’s media use and practices are inter-twined with media consumption, it has become evident that some groups have taken a more active role in participating in the design and production of their ‘me-dia everyday’, a space that was before reserved for professional designers and es-tablished actors (Löwgren and Reimer 2012, 2013). The wider user participation not only changes digital culture and its creation, it fundamentally alters the design and development of the infrastructures and structures they rely on (Manovich 2001, Bruns 2008, Schäfer 2011).1 This, along with abundance of both amateur and
pro-fessionally produced media, presents new demands and challenges to contempo-rary design research and professional digital and media design practice, especially in terms of understanding what participation and collaboration means in the de-sign of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for digital cultural heritage and for systems involved in everyday and professional cultural production. A multitude of new technology systems and infrastructures have been or are be-ing developed to facilitate and foster access to digital collections and engagement with institutional digital cultural heritage. At the same time, there are plenty of novel platforms and systems for exploring and engaging with everyday creativity and cultural production online. However, less efforts have been placed on under-standing how to collectively form and foster digital culture heritage collections at
1 During the first decade of 2000 a great deal of literature was written about the
participating audiences and participatory media, and its modalities and characteristics. To review this body of knowledge is not within the scope of this study, but I have highlighted here some of the writings that investigate the connection of cultural and media production, rather than focusing on the logic of participation on online platform. For these, see e.g. Nielsen (2006), O’Reilly (2005).
1. IntroductIon 17
the intersection between established institutions and ordinary people, and I argue that there is a gap between the practices of one and the other. At present, we know little about how to collaboratively design information infrastructures that would support and sustain shared forms of digital cultural heritage production, and this lack of in-depth knowledge keeps design from supporting effectively the building of the digital cultural commons and bridging the gap between citizens and estab-lished institutions. Thus, my contribution in this dissertation is to develop a design approach that sets out strategies and principles for infrastructuring for cultural commons.
1.1 Research area and
theoretical stances
In this doctoral dissertation I study how participatory design and digital design endeavors can contribute to a wider public access to digital cultural heritage2. Here,
the understanding of the notion of digital cultural heritage is threefold: First, digi-tal cultural heritage is understood as digidigi-tal artefacts and materials that are im-plemented in digital technologies, and secondly as interactions, relationships and boundaries created and performed in the digital domain (cf. Cameron and Kend-erdine 2007). Thirdly, digital cultural heritage is understood as a cultural practice, an on-going dynamic and relational process of engagement, of negotiation and articulation of identity, values and cultural and social meanings, practiced by citi-zens and institutions (Smith 2006). In my doctoral work all three of these facets are relevant, and especially, I focus on the interconnections and crossings between digital cultural heritage, either digitized or born-digital assets, and digital cultural production by citizens.
In motivating my research, I point to a gap between the official institutional digital cultural heritage collections and systems, and the digital platforms through
2 The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (2003) defines digital cultural heritage as ”resources of information and creative expression are increasingly produced, distributed, accessed and maintained in digital form, creating a new legacy – the digital heritage”. These materials include a variety of outcomes of creative activities such as ”texts, databases, still and moving images, audio, graphics, software and web pages, among a wide and growing range of formats” (p. 74).
which ordinary people – citizens – create and share digital cultural works. My work aims to support the bridging of this gap by providing empirical insights from three real-life design research cases working with both sides – cultural heritage in-stitutions and everyday media users. Central to my research is to explore and pro-pose design strategies for collaborative infrastructuring for digital cultural heritage. In my study, I interrogate how infrastructural work can be active in constructing and contributing to cultural commons. By presenting insights and findings from the participatory and collaborative design (co-design) efforts in the three design cases that form the empirical part of my work, my thesis addresses the complexity of, possibilities in, and limits for infrastructuring for cultural commons.
The concept of commons plays a significant role in how I frame, understand and analyze my three design cases. I understand commons as particular social arrange-ments for managing and governing shared resources either locally (Ostrom 1990, Ostrom and Hess 2007), or, in some cases, as public and open access commons (Benkler 2006, 2013) that are cared for through collective action and commoning (Bollier and Helfrich 2012). My focus is particularly on the characteristics of the concept that has lately been referred to as cultural commons (Madison et al. 2010, Hyde 2010, Hess 2012, Bertacchini 2012). Another key concept in my doctoral re-search is infrastructuring. Here, I build upon rere-search originating from the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition and the seminal work of Star (1999) and Star and Ruhleder (1994, 1996) in which they – rather than giving priority to indi-vidual technology systems or artefacts – focus on relational and contextual aspects of information infrastructures, as well as on considering people and their situated actions in infrastructural development. The idea of seeing design as
infrastructur-ing (Karasti and Syrjänen, 2004, Karasti and Baker 2004, Pipek and Wulf 2009)
stems from a recognition of the importance of drawing attention not to what an infrastructure is but when, how and for whom infrastructures become (Star and Ruhleder 1995, see also Star and Bowker, 2006, Ehn 2008, Karasti 2014). These theoretical foundations will be elaborated in Chapter 2.
My research is multi-disciplinary, and it is situated in the intersection of Par-ticipatory Design (PD), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). My work builds on the traditions in de-sign research that see dede-sign as participatory and collaborative processes. It also in particular builds on scholarly work that draws on the concept of commons – to better capture and articulate the emerging modes of digital culture use, cultural
1. IntroductIon 19
production and collaborative design in collective and open-ended settings. The commons literature spans economic, legal, and activist-practitioner perspectives. To better understand the collaboration and collective action amongst diverse au-diences – and their engagement in the use and production of digital culture and media on the Internet – I also tap into scholarly work coming from cultural and media studies. This eclecticism in the use of scientific literature is warranted by the multifaceted nature of the ill-structured ‘wicked problems’ I study (cf. Rittel and Webber 1973), as these involve legal issues, social practices, state and private insti-tutions, cultures and subcultures, technological systems and the use thereof.
That design scholars are drawing from the STS literature is in itself nothing new (cf. Woodhouse and Patton 2004). However, there has been a growing inter-est, especially in PD, in studying information infrastructures, understanding their socio-material-technical characteristics and applying history and theory from in-frastructure studies, a field within STS, or framing their investigations in terms of infrastructures. The current nexus of infrastructural design is concerned with the intersection of technical design and peoples’ related social and media practices, with an aim to integrate these practices and existing systems and tools with new structures being developed (Ehn 2008, Björgvinsson et al. 2010, 2012a, DiSalvo 2012). Research on the collaborative design of infrastructures for digital cultural heritage, the specific research topic I am addressing, has devoted some discus-sion to the “becoming of ” or “making of ” of an infrastructure (Karasti et al. 2010, Björgvinsson 2014, Stuedahl et al. 2016) and to which infrastructuring strategies this becoming/making of entails. Karasti and Baker (2004) have put forward a question that is still highly relevant, “How to create infrastructures that are large scale and can operate for the long term?” This becomes ever more so in the age of omnipresent digital infrastructures and for digital cultural heritage. Especially, I argue, it is relevant in contemporary PD endeavors, where democratic design ex-periments are still often highly centralized and serving primarily local needs (Ehn et al. 2014).
In this doctoral dissertation, I argue that commons and infrastructures are in a deep and inter-dependent relationship; in order for a commons to flourish, it requires a functioning infrastructure that allows for the evolution and expansions of both in coexistence. Through developing infrastructuring strategies, I suggest ways in which professional participatory designers engaging with digital culture and digital cultural heritage could contribute to the longevity and sustainability
of cultural commons, and at the same time strengthen the infrastructure that car-ries the actors, the digital artefacts and the social practices connected to the in-frastructure and to sustaining the commons. In developing this argument, I will draw on some of the recent insights in PD that have identified a need for better understanding the implications of new forms of politics, policies and emerging practices. This literature sees design as concerned with infrastructuring (Ehn 2008, Björgvinsson et al. 2010, 2012a, Hillgren et al. 2011, 2016, DiSalvo et al. 2012, Teli 2015a, 2015b, Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013, Seravalli 2014, Linström and Ståhl 2014, Stuedahl et al. 2016, (Stuedahl and Smørdal 2015). This dissertation thus contrib-utes to the developing body of work on infrastructuring, and what infrastructuring may entail in PD. It does so by connecting the commons discourse to the contem-porary discussion of infrastructuring, and by bringing insights and findings from the involvement and experiences of the co-design efforts undertaken in the design cases: building two technology platforms for digital culture and cultural heritage, and supporting and engaging with an open culture movement.
1.2 Identifying and addressing
gaps in practice and literature
The production and designation of culture and heritage is highly complex, contest-ed and political in our society (Ahmad 2006, Dalbello 2009, Cameron 2010, Sil-vermann 2016). Bourdieu (1983/1993) described well how individuals, groups and institutions are constantly shaping and competing over the power to create mean-ing and value of cultural works, and to control or influence what is considered art and culture. Bourdieu’s notion of ‘field of cultural production’ combines aspects of social conditions, circulation and consumption of cultural materials and their rela-tions. This field is occupied by various actors competing for the resources, positions,
symbolic power and capital (e.g. authority, recognition, legitimacy) that the field has
to offer. This capital is unevenly distributed among different groups and individu-als. In the context of cultural capital, some individuals and institutions, according to Bourdieu, have more accumulated capital and can use this to determine, for example, what is considered art and what is designated as cultural heritage. Thus, a central contention of my research is that there is a gap between on one side the official institutional digital cultural heritage collections, systems and practices
1. IntroductIon 21
for accumulating, governing and making cultural heritage materials accessible, and on the other side the social practices and technological platforms through which citizens and communities create and share digital cultural works. My political aim in my doctoral research work is to point to and propose ways to create more open, equal and symmetrical3 access to, use and governance of our past, and to
contrib-ute to enduring and sustainable cultural commons. For this, then, it is essential to bridge across between ordinary people and cultural heritage institutions. The ways of achieving this depend on the nature of the gap identified above. At the moment the institutions are separated from groups and individuals at least in three signifi-cant ways:
First, people have limited access to and possibility to engage with digital
cul-tural heritage materials held by institutions. Despite the long-standing efforts to increase access to digital cultural heritage, today only a small fraction of the digital holdings in Europe are being made accessible to the wider public by cultural in-stitutions (Stroeker and Vogels 2014). In cases where digital cultural heritage ma-terials have been made accessible online, they are often released under restrictive terms of use (Bellini et al. 2014, Estermann et al. 2015, Estermann 2015) and the scope for circulation and collaborative re-use of digital heritage is often limited (Terras 2015, Marttila and Hyyppä 2014a). As argued by many scholars (Tsolis et al. 2011, Anderson 2013), intellectual property rights and other rights issues such as privacy issues are an important factor preventing open access to and use of our digital cultural heritage materials online. This is due, mainly, to practical reasons: the legal regulations and terms of use of digital cultural heritage materials vary greatly, and there is a need for harmonizing the rights and exceptions to copy-rights (e.g. non-commercial use, educational use). In addition, often many cultural heritage institutions do not hold the rights to their assets in the digital collections, or institutions do not have enough resources to conduct the process of clearing the rights. Commentators also point out that many cultural heritage institutions fear a loss of authority and control over their collections, or fear losing possible sources of future revenue if they release their digital cultural materials on more open terms (Tsolis et al. 2011, Verwayen et al. 2011).
3 I have adopted the use of term ”symmetrical” in connection to commons from Yochai Benkler (see e.g. Benkler 2013, 2017) to convey alignment in access to and use of shared resources.
Second, both institutions’ collections of digital cultural heritage and their
man-agement differ significantly from commons-based peer production and from the practices encouraged and enabled by the participation platforms on the Internet. Even if the designation of cultural heritage resources are often considered as of pub-lic interest, often only official institutional processes and mechanisms direct the se-lection of heritage assets (e.g. objects, intangible culture) to be reproduced as digital cultural heritage. Furthermore, the maintenance and enrichment of these digitized cultural collections is often guided by rigorously defined best practices, policies and standards. In contrast, the governance and management of commons-based and shared cultural resources online relies more on evolving social practices developed among members of a community or a network in flexible and fluid processes4 (cf.
Benkler 2006, Benkler and Nissembaum 2006, Bruns 2008). Little discussion ex-ists in design research regarding the convergence and co-existence of institutional cultural heritage and commons-based cultural production and heritage practice, and about how to bridge official institutional practices and traditions with the production and appropriation practices of the general public (see Stuedahl 2007). This lack of understanding, I argue, is one reason for why cultural heritage institutions continue to struggle with forming fruitful relationships with their audiences and understand-ing their emergunderstand-ing digital engagement. More importantly, this lack of understandunderstand-ing is also one of the main factors in perpetuating the practices that continue to deny citizens the access to, the use of and the influence on digital cultural heritage materi-als. This is problematic as heritage is designated in the name of the public, collected for their benefit, and (typically) managed and maintained at the public’s expense.
Cultural institutions are increasingly exploring ways to create new collaborations with publics and to open up possibilities for people to curate, collect, contextualize and create cultural works from the institutions’ digital collections (see e.g. Adair et al. 2011). Most known, and worth mentioning from an institutional perspective, is Flickr Commons, an online repository that provides open, free access to digital im-ages whose copyrights have expired or are unknown. Other well-known examples are Project Gutenberg, which has developed the oldest major digital library through
4 A well-known example of this flexible process is the community-created folksonomies that emerge through the use of the hashtag symbol (#) on social media. This practice adds additional context and metadata to an item, and aids the navigation and organization of the media materials by forming in a sense a collection of similarly labeled items.
1. IntroductIon 23
digitizing and archiving literary works5 since the 1970s, and the Wikimedia
com-munity. The GLAM-Wiki initiative has created concrete practices and formed part-nerships with heritage institutions that are interested in sharing their collections on Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Through different projects, e.g. Wiki Loves Monuments, or Public Art on Wikipedia, the Wikimedia community has also created alternative cultural heritage repositories, apart from the general social media platforms which also occasionally act as arenas for novel forms of digital culture6. Through initiatives
like these, institutions and communities alike are attempting to contribute to cul-tural commons. In these two examples, Flickr and Wikipedia/Wikimedia, the plat-forms used have first served people and their collaborative efforts (e.g. media shar-ing), and only later, when user volumes have grown and novel media practices have become more established, have digital cultural heritage institutions joined or started to use the platforms. There are also other recent efforts, such as Europeana Labs7,
that attempt to bring cultural heritage institutions’ own platforms and practices to-gether with community practices and community-created content and software (see e.g. Benardou et al. 2017). Nevertheless, in most cases, unfortunately, when cultural heritage institutions pool their collections and offerings for open access, they do not pay sustained attention to people’s actual or emerging media practices.8 It is also
common for institutions not to offer means through which people can take part in decision-making or governance of these common-pool resources.This is often also the case when commercial platforms are involved, making the future sustainability of the efforts uncertain, and threatening the harvested or common resources with com-mercial or institutional co-optation.
Third, institutions’ technological systems and tools for allowing access to digital
cultural heritage are often incompatible with platforms used by practitioners and
5 At the moment, the Project Gutenberg provides universal access to over 50 000 electronic books. Source and more information: http://www.gutenbergnews.org/about/history-of-project-gutenberg/.
6 For overview of the GLAM-wiki initiative and its projects visit: https://outreach.wikimedia. org/wiki/GLAM.
7 Europana Labs is maintained by Europeana, and its offerings include resources such as APIs, example projects and curated datasets. Visit: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/about-europeana-labs.
8 This said, there are a growing number of community heritage and memory initiatives where groups and individuals preserve their heritage in digital reservoirs and archives (see e.g. Waterton & Watson 2013, Giaccardi 2012, Stuedahl et al. 2016, Ciolfi et al. 2017).
professionals from other domains (e.g. researchers, educators, creative industry), meaning that the system chosen by the institution is not necessarily the one that could benefit their digital repositories the most. Digitalization of libraries, archives and museums has prompted a significant amount of research in their specific fields and domains, as well as in neighboring fields such as information science (for re-view see Marty 2010). The discourse in Europe has been driven by the European Commission’s (EC) cultural policy work that advocated joint “memory institutions” (I will return to the notion of memory institutions in Chapter 3). In addition to this agenda, a strong emphasis has been given to the practical technological and legal issues and challenges hindering digitalization. Aspects related to preserva-tion, management and documentapreserva-tion, technical interoperability, and the develop-ment of shared schemas, standards and formats, have received a lot of attention both in academic discourse and in practical work. In addition, large efforts have been invested in designing digitization processes and forming interoperable digital collections with shared data standards and formats (see e.g. Ioannides et al. 2016, Hemsley et al. 2017). In many cases, however, the existing legal frameworks and lack of rights prevents cultural heritage institutions from developing technology platforms that could allow making their digitized collections available.
In scholarly literature CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work),
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and PD (Participatory Design) communi-ties have made a range of knowledge contributions to the digital cultural heritage domain. In her literature review Ciolfi (2013) traces the engagement in CSCW with cultural heritage to three key areas of interest: 1) The social interaction, en-gagement, and experience of visitors to heritage collections. 2) The design and development of technologies in relation to cultural heritage, including how this technology use could enhance and mediate visits to the existing heritage sites or institutions. 3) The design and creation of interactive installations, artistic ob-jects and performances that, in themselves, form “a heritage artefact”. Neverthe-less, collective action and social practices are under-studied themes within the CSCW and cultural heritage literature (Ciolfi 2013). Connecting digital cultural heritage to collaborative infrastructural development and open assets and practices is not common in scholarly work within design research, yet some studies exist. For example, Stuedahl and colleagues have studied the perceptions of profession-als and citizens during infrastructural work, and “how they find ways to realize a new openness within the framework of existing practices of their local institution”
1. IntroductIon 25
(Stuedahl et al. 2016, p. 53). HCI also has a long established interest in studying the cultural heritage domain, and especially in novel interactive systems and services that could be made possible in cultural heritage sites or physical organizations (see e.g. Ficarra et al. 2012, Ciolfi and McLoughlin 2013). These previous studies have been narrower in scope than what I propose in my doctoral work, and have paid little attention to issues of common or shared digital cultural heritage, or to how we can collectively achieve more open access heritage systems.
Theorizing and analyzing the relationship between cultural heritage and tech-nology is also a developed field on its own, however this literature focuses mainly on the issues and practices relevant for professionals in the heritage organiza-tions (e.g. managing and conserving cultural heritage), on the representation of the digital heritage object, or on the outcomes of using technology (e.g. exhibi-tions, catalogues) (Cameron et al. 2007). In studies on information infrastructures for collecting institutions and/or cultural heritage institutions, the focus has often been on understanding the practices of the official institutions (e.g. documenta-tion, categorization), or visitors, or users of the collections. The question has then been how to enhance access from a technology point-of-view, but rarely aiming at bridging these two different worlds to create more symmetrical ways of negotiat-ing what is our common culture and designated to digital cultural heritage, and how is it governed and maintained. In this dissertation, I aim to do that.
In the cultural heritage sector and related scholarly literature, a lot of effort has been placed to understand what cultural heritage is, and could be, in the digital age. Early accounts focused on the notion of “new heritage” and issues such as dig-ital preservation and forming virtual exhibitions (see e.g. Kalay et al. 2007). Public engagement and participation has been paid attention to especially in collecting institutions such as museums and archives that have a long history of including visitors as participants in their production and dissemination of cultural heritage (Cameron and Kenderdine 2007, Labrador and Chilton 2009, Simon 2010, Owens 2013, Bhowmik 2016). There is also a growing attention to citizen-driven heritage initiatives (Adair et al. 2011, Owens 2013, Giaccardi 2012, Petrelli et al. 2016, Stue-dahl et al. 2016, StueStue-dahl and Smørdal 2015, Ciolfi et al. 2017). A recent study re-viewing a large set of scholarly literature and heritage professionals’ practices and tools on enabling public engagement of digital heritage concludes that heritage institutions are increasing the speed with which they are applying digital means to enhance the value of the digital collections (King et al. 2016). Thus, exploring
new forms of engagement, such as social enrichment of digital heritage offerings via crowdsourcing, have been popular among the established institutions (see e.g. Ridge 2014, Oomen and Arroyo 2011). Other types of participation include: “ac-quiring and documenting cultural heritage holdings for museums and other in-stitutions, … generating commentaries and discussion around heritage, … iden-tifying, preserving and communicating heritage” (Ciolfi et al. 2015, p. 149). Often these crowdsourcing efforts, carried out by institutions, assign a pre-defined role and task to participants along with a set of rules the game they can play a part in. To simplify, heritage knowledge production, especially the act of assigning materi-als to the “canon”, has remained with institutions while participation efforts have focused on how to engage and explore with outcomes after these cultural and cura-torial decisions have been made. Yet, new collaborations between heritage institu-tions, community-driven initiatives and digital technologies are rapidly emerging, opening opportunities for more on-going and sustained relationships (Ciolfi et al. 2017).
Within the PD field, with which my research aims to be in dialogue, there has been attempts to “democratize” these institutions and “empower” visitors and au-diences to engage with official institutional practices and processes. This already vast body of knowledge has applied PD tools and techniques to engage visitors in participatory practices within cultural heritage institutions (e.g. Salgado and Bo-tero 2008, Dindler et al. 2010, Bossen et al. 2012, Stuedahl 2011, Stuedahl and Lowe 2013), to experiment with social media production (Watkins 2007, Stuedahl 2009, Giaccardi 2012, Stuedahl and Smørdal 2015), and designing exhibitions, encounters and experiences with digital cultural heritage (e.g. Salgado 2009, Avram and Maye 2016, Ciolfi et al. 2016). Even when digital technologies are adopted in heritage institutions, and materials are made available in digital form, the ways offered for people to engage with them have remained somewhat the same (McLean 2007, Salgado and Botero 2008). Therefore, there is still a need for more horizontal de-sign approaches and strategies for digital culture and digital cultural heritage.
1. IntroductIon 27
1.3 Research focus, stance and questions
Given the above challenges, shortcomings and gaps in both scientific literature and professional and everyday practices – i.e. in the heritage sector and within design research – the research problem tackled in this doctoral dissertation is con-cerned with the relational processes of engagement, negotiation and articulations of digital cultural heritage at the intersection of established cultural institutions and ordinary people. This research focus stems from the current lack of a com-prehensive understanding of the tensions and potentials in collaboratively design-ing infrastructures for digital cultural heritage in more open-ended and collective terms. The focus is also rooted in my personal interest towards opening wider pub-lic access to and possibilities for creative reuse of digital cultural heritage materi-als, and in my ”activist academic” position. This notion is borrowed from Pecorelli (2015) and complemented with the ”hacktivism” design research approach put for-ward by von Busch (2008, 2014). The activist academic framing refers to my goal to challenge the current unequal and asymmetrical order in the digital cultural her-itage domain. Throughout the dissertation I advocate for an approach according to which digital cultural heritage could be arranged and understood as a cultural commons, and for more collaborative modes of social care for and governance of the commons (Light and Akama 2012). My personal stance – in favor of open-ing access to our common digital culture and history – stems from two ideologi-cal strands: from the Participatory Design approach, and from the Open Culture movement. In the Chapter 3, I return to my political stance and position and its underpinnings.
My research casts light on the challenges and opportunities that contemporary design research and professional design practice, especially PD, faces. New chal-lenges arise when people are increasingly operating in commons frameworks and initiating new forms of participation and collective action, leading to novel modes of cultural creativity and production that rely on social networks, digital platforms and shared common-pool resources on the Internet. To investigate these issues, I have formulated two research questions to underpin my doctoral research:
(1) The first research question is of procedural matter:
How can we collaboratively design socio-material-technical information infrastructures for digital cultural heritage in more open and symmetrical terms?
Taking on board recent work on infrastructuring, I can further specify this ques-tion: What infrastructuring strategies could be constructive for institutions seek-ing to create open and meanseek-ingful access for digital cultural heritage collections, and for enabling and sustaining collaboration between various actors? Conversely, what commoning tactics and practices could be beneficial for people’s increasingly complex creative pursuits with digital culture and cultural heritage materials? (2) The second question follows the insights obtained from enquiry of the first
question:
What are the requirements for a professional digital media designer and design researcher engaged in the above forms of participatory design?
To specify this question in practical terms, this question leads me to probe initial principles and orientation for designers operating in open-ended and communal settings, and to discuss and reflect on how these directions could affect designers understanding of their PD practice. Here, requirements refer to a set of new skills, capabilities and attitudes.
To answer these research questions, I analyze and reflect on my participation in the collaborative design and development of two information systems: Fusion and EUscreen. These are both technology platforms aimed at contributing to wider access to, and appropriation of European audiovisual digital cultural herit-age. I also analyze and reflect on my engagement with a local cultural movement AvoinGLAM (“avoin” means “open” in Finnish, the acronym GLAM comes from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) advocating for open culture. Geo-graphically, my research is somewhat Eurocentric as the cases and co-design ex-periments are conducted in European countries with European digital cultural heritage, and influenced by European Union (EU) funding mechanisms and agen-das. The research was conducted as Participatory Design, where I have combined approaches from Action Research and Research through Design. I describe my research trajectory, research design and methodology in detail in Chapter 3.9 9 This multi-method approach has been earlier applied by other researchers in my home
department, and my work continues a series of doctoral dissertations that carry out multidisciplinary and collaborative design research in diverse settings (see e.g. Díaz-Kommonen 2002, Salgado 2009, Leinonen 2010, Botero 2013, Saad-Sulonen 2014).
1. IntroductIon 29
I explore and discuss possible strategies for collaborative infrastructuring, and interrogate how infrastructures and the conditions that surround them influence the process of constructing and contributing to cultural commons. Presenting insights and findings from the collaborative design efforts made in constructing the socio-material-technical and cultural infrastructures in the cases, the doctoral dissertation thus addresses the potentials, complexity and limits of infrastructur-ing for cultural commons. To analyze the three design research cases, I connect discussions and practices related to commons and the becoming of information infrastructures (Star 1999, Star and Ruhleder 1994, 1996). I make use of the theo-retical concepts of installed base and gateway, both developed within studies on infrastructures. I also apply the notion of common-pool resources (CPR) as play-ing a role in a design strategy for co-constructplay-ing cultural commons, and propose a design orientation of ‘commons design’, building upon commons research but giving it a decisive designerly reformulation. Bringing these research perspectives and concepts together, I have formed an analytic frame for discussing the collabo-rative infrastructural work in my three design research case studies. This analytic framework applied in Chapter 5 is a combination of two accounts developed in research articles included in this dissertation (Article 5: Marttila 2016 and Article 6: Marttila and Botero 2017).
I situate the design cases in relation to the interest in advocating not only for preservation and access to digital cultural heritage, but more pressingly for the importance of enabling creative re-use in a variety of domains (e.g. civic action, learning, research). This links to contemporary discussions on the im-portance of creating and sustaining commons, and in particular, cultural com-mons. I discuss how technology systems for digital cultural heritage, and the conditions that surround them, participate in the construction of cultural com-mons. Through presenting some selected examples, I discuss how design can contribute to the infrastructuring of cultural commons, and shed light on the issues for professional designers that operate in open-ended and commons-based settings.
1.4 Summary of the cases
and research articles
The six articles included in this dissertation address different aspects of the re-search area and rere-search questions presented above through three design rere-search cases, namely Case 1: Fusion, Case 2: EUscreen and Case 3: AvoinGLAM. Fu-sion was targeted at helping communities of practice to share and create com-munity media, and EUscreen aimed to create a single access point for television programs coming from various European broadcasting corporations and audiovis-ual archives. Both of these projects were co-funded by the European Commission (EC), and involved multi-professional consortia from various European countries. The projects had multiple objectives and various research outcomes in different research domains. In my dissertation I focus on the collaborative and participatory design efforts that were a part of these long-term research initiatives, and aimed for designing information technologies and services for various user groups. The third case of my dissertation, AvoinGLAM, is an initiative that aimed to build a bridge between the two different kinds of actors that are central to my dissertation, namely official cultural heritage institutions and citizens. In the AvoinGLAM case, I draw on my four-year engagement with an open culture movement in Fin-land. The purpose of the case is to examine how participatory design processes can strengthen interaction and participation in commons-based frameworks, and how infrastructuring and commoning activities can support the emergence of cul-tural commons. The two earlier cases, Fusion and EUscreen, attempted to design technology platforms for legal creative re-use and open and/or public access to digitized audiovisual materials, and I found that such initiatives had their limita-tions. The findings from these cases pointed to the need for more collective and open-ended design orientations for approaching digital culture and digital cultur-al heritage. Fusion and EUscreen thus led me to the different approach taken in the AvoinGLAM case. Taken together, these three experiences provide me with a broad view of the infrastructuring challenges for digital cultural heritage, and point to a wide set of issues that, I will argue, are central to the emergence of cul-tural commons across time. I summarize the cases in Table 1, and elaborate them in Chapter 3.
1. IntroductIon 31
Case 1: Fusion Case 2: EUscreen Case 3: AvoinGLAM
Short description of unit of an analysis
The co-design process and design experiments of the Fusion design platform and Social Media Application Toolkit (SMAK)
The co-design process of the EUscreen portal. Design experiments devised to support and stimulate creative re-use of digital archival video materials.
The co-design and design experiments to support art and culture institutions’ efforts to open part of their digital holdings, and to enable citizens to appropriate digital cultural heritage materials.
Context and
framework The design and research work was conducted in the context of the P2P-FUSION project 2006—2009 co-funded by the European Union. Seven partners from three different countries formed the consortium.
The design and research work was carried out in the context of the EUscreen project 2010—2012 co-funded by the European Union. Altogether 28 partners, largely audiovisual archives, from various EU countries formed the project consortium.
The focus of the analysis is during the initiation of the movement during 2012—2015 (the initiative is still ongoing). The AvoinGLAM was initiated within Aalto University ARTS, and later became a part of the Open Knowledge Finland association. Two projects under analysis in the doctoral work were funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education in Finland.
Co-design
participants Interdisciplinary project consortium, communities of practice, targeted user groups, external practitioners, designers and software developers, other stakeholders (e.g. teachers, experts).
Interdisciplinary project consortium, targeted user groups in education, research, leisure and open culture, heritage organizations, practitioners, artists, designers and software developers, other stakeholders (e.g. teachers).
Representatives from libraries, archives, museums and third sector organizations - creative practitioners, experts and amateurs alike. Open for everyone to participate. Key co-design
efforts and experiments
Co-design workshops with communities of practice SMAK Toys – a co-design game for co-design workshop Prototypes
Collaborative design workshops, hands-on and do-it-yourself events (e.g. remix video workshop, hack day) Design prototypes and experiments
Towards open culture co-design workshops
Open cultural data Master Class
Hack4FI – Hack your heritage! Open culture hackathon Open culture prototypes and concepts
Data collected Documentation and analysis of co-design efforts and design experiments
Semi-structured participant interviews and field observations
Questionnaires and surveys
Documentation of co-design workshops and design efforts and prototypes
Semi-structured participant interviews and field observations
Questionnaires and surveys
Documentation of co-design workshops and other arrangements, participant and field observations, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires
Common-pool resources and open culture datasets Table 1. Overview of the design research cases of the doctoral dissertation.
The individual arguments in the articles are shaped by the scholarly context for which they were written, namely design research, PD, HCI and CSCW. The arti-cles can be grouped in four different themes (some artiarti-cles fit in two categories): (1) Presenting the three co-design cases and understanding emerging media and
social practices linked to digital culture and digital cultural heritage (Articles 1, 3 & 6).
(2) Documenting and discussing design strategies and solutions for digital cul-ture and digital cultural heritage (Articles 3 & 6).
(3) Exploring and reviewing research literature on co-design of digital media and technology, and on commons, to base the development of theoretical foundations (Articles 4 & 5).
(4) Developing a framework for infrastructuring for cultural commons (Articles 5 & 6).
The articles are presented in detail in Chapter 5, in Table 2 on page 36 the original articles and their key findings and central concepts are listed.
Case 1: Fusion Case 2: EUscreen Case 3: AvoinGLAM
My position and
role(s) Project lead, participatory designer and design researcher Project lead of co-design efforts, participatory designer and researcher
Initiator of the AvoinGLAM network and working group, project design and principal investigator of the funding applications
Academic activist and open culture practitioner Original research articles presenting and analyzing the cases 1 & 6 3 & 6 5
1. IntroductIon 33
1.5 Contributions and
relevance of the research
This dissertation contributes to the discourse on infrastructuring in contemporary design research, especially in the fields of PD and CSCW, by presenting empiri-cally grounded findings and proposals from the three design research cases. My doctoral research thus makes two key contributions:
As the first contribution, I develop a theoretical framework that combines
in-frastructuring and commons. By bringing these research perspectives together,
and exploring some of their specific concepts, I form an analytic frame for discuss-ing the collaborative infrastructural work in my case studies. The framework is then applied to address the tensions and dynamics of infrastructural development and infrastructural change for digital cultural heritage. Doing so allows me to fur-ther explore and use the concept of infrastructuring, nuancing and deepening its nexus with PD. The framework allows me to propose four infrastructuring strat-egies for cultural commons, namely: 1) probing and building upon the installed base, 2) stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways, 3) produc-ing common-pool resources, and 4) fosterproduc-ing and shapproduc-ing a commons culture that supports commoning. These strategies are presented and discussed in Chapter 5. Previous research has experimented with the application of infrastructuring and commons ideas in design research (for a review of this in PD see Karasti 2014, in CSCW see Pipek et al. 2017), and my work is in dialogue with and furthers this literature. In particular, I aim contribute to recent thinking that draws on con-ceptual tools surrounding the concept of the commons to better understand new modes of participation, production, and designing and commoning.
By connecting commons literature and research on information infrastructures and drawing on the practical design work conducted in the cases, I explore how some of the central issues to PD can be reconsidered to guide a future design research agenda. Thus, the second contribution of my doctoral work is that I
pre-sent initial principles for designers and researchers operating in commons-like frameworks, outlining what ‘commons design’ may look like.
In addition to these key contributions, this doctoral dissertation offers nuanced understanding of the aspects of co-designing socio-technical information infra-structures for digital culture and cultural heritage, and highlights how conditions surrounding infrastructure influence the design. The findings serve two purposes:
First, the experiences deriving from the design research cases inform and verify multiple gaps between, on the one hand, the institutional and professional practic-es of digital cultural heritage, and on the other hand, the practicpractic-es of appropriators. These emerge in the technological frameworks, standards and policies, through which access to shared resources and cultural production is managed, governed and provisioned, as well as in the practices through which people and institutions engage with digital cultural heritage. Secondly, in practical terms, my multiple explorations and experiments with how to collaboratively design for shared digi-tal cultural heritage in more open and symmetrical terms, and how to bridge be-tween the technology design and appropriation, describe new methods for PD. It contributes to the longstanding tradition of PD and its maturing principles and practices, and helps to articulate new methods and techniques for engaging people in design activities (cf. Schuler and Namioka 1993, Spinuzzi 2004, Robertson and Simonsen 2012).
In addition to the empirically grounded findings and proposals contained in the individual articles, put together, this dissertation contributes both practical impli-cations and theoretical considerations useful for professional practice. The targeted audience of this dissertation is commoners, design researchers and practitioners working within PD, and professionals operating in the digital cultural heritage sector or applying PD or co-design methods.
1.6. Structure of the dissertation
The thesis begins by contextualizing the doctoral research by bringing together perspectives from relevant bodies of literature, in Chapter 2. I introduce the the-oretical considerations and key terms, and link them to the three research areas relevant to this doctoral dissertation: Participatory Design, infrastructuring, and cultural commons. The purpose of this is to contextualize and frame the empirical work conducted in the case studies.
In Chapter 3, I present my research methodology and trajectory, and introduce the three design research case studies that form the empirical foundation of my doctoral research. In addition, I situate the cases in relation to digitalization and convergence of cultural heritage institutions in Europe. I position my design re-search activities and motivations in relation to openness and access. Furthermore,
1. IntroductIon 35
I detail how the data was acquired according to the principles laid out in my re-search design.
In Chapter 4, I synthesize and summarize the six original research articles that form the main body of work conducted in this doctoral dissertation. I also highlight the aspects that are relevant to the research questions set out above, and foreground the contributions from the individual articles.
In Chapter 5, I return to the notions of commons and information structures, and combine this theoretical framing with a discussion of infra-structuring to contextualize and reflect upon the empirical work conducted. As my key contribution, I present a set of infrastructuring strategies aiming at constructing and contributing to cultural commons. I combine the different conceptual and theoretical perspectives that have emerged during the research process to discuss requirements for professional media and interaction design-ers, and for the field of PD in general. I explore the contours of a design orien-tation that I term commons design, and it preliminary principles.
In the last chapter, Chapter 6, I conclude the dissertation by briefly sum-ming up the results of my work and offering a few final remarks and thoughts on the implications of my study for future research. The original research ar-ticles are attached to this introductory chapter (see Appendix 1).
Purpose of
the article Name of the Publication Key Findings Setting the stage: Presenting and discussing the co-design cases and experiments and their key findings Marttila, Sanna; Hyyppä, Kati and Kommonen, Kari-Hans (2011). Co-Design of a Software Toolkit for Media Practices: P2P-Fusion Case Study, New Media Technologies and User Empowerment. Jo Pierson, Enid Mante-Meijer and Eugène Loos (Eds.). Peter Lang - International Academic Publishers, USA.
Forming co-design partnerships for real-life needs.
It is important to nurture the co-design approach in a wider multidisciplinary environment and concretize the value of each of the co-design partners’ efforts. Timing of user involvement is crucial in the software development process. In addition, longer projects should be flexible to changing conditions of participants and adjust according to their current needs and resources. Participating people should have a real life need or a practice that they can contribute to the process, and naturally in return obtain relevant knowledge or experiences that contribute to their everyday.
Self-discovery and evolution of everyday media practices is key to co-design of software toolkit and system. The case incorporated several co-design methods, tools and work practices. The use of low-fidelity co-design tools and paper prototypes in the ideation phase supported not only identifying needs and wishes of communities, but also creating a common language among the design partners.
Open access to design documents, resources and tools is pivotal to co-design partners. One of the key insights of the co-design process was that the professional designers should provide access to resources and tools to encourage communities to share their experiences, knowledge or designs with their peers.
Co-design efforts should aim for openness and designability. In our findings we conclude that despite of the challenges in engaging everyday people without programming skills to the co-design of technology infrastructures, it is important for designers and software developers to learn to design for openness and for designability.
Keywords and concepts: Media practice, co-design, openness, designability, common resources.
Table 2. A summary of the original research publications and their key findings. The research articles are elaborated in Chapter 4, and are attached to this dissertation (Appendix 1).
1. IntroductIon 37
Purpose of
the article Name of the Publication Key Findings Setting the stage: Presenting and discussing the co-design cases and experiments and their key findings
Marttila, Sanna & Hyyppä, Kati (2014b). Rights to Remember? How Copyrights Complicate Media Design. In Proceedings 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (NordiCHI’14), ACM, Oct. 2014, pp. 481–490.
Copyright issues are an overlooked factor in design of digital participation platforms for audiovisual cultural heritage. Intellectual property issues influence both the design of technology platforms for digital cultural heritage and the selection of cultural content made available through these systems.
Design of experiments, workarounds and pilots for rehearsing desirable futures together. Media design is limited by the copyright restrictions, and new design strategies are called for to meet the needs and wishes of diverse user groups. Design experiments, workarounds and pilot projects allow people to access and participate in environments that are not possible due to the legal frameworks or other limitations.
Politics of memory, and politics in design.
As designers we might think in terms of facilitating collaboration and co-creation, but at the same time we might be enacting and facilitating restrictive IPR regimes against people’s existing media practices. Some memories and ways of remembering may become illegal due to unavoidable copyright infringements. We also note how digital media design projects dealing with cultural heritage risks re-introducing copyrights and endanger designing robust and sustainable cultural commons.
Keywords and concepts: Media design, co-design, cultural heritage, copyrights Marttila, Sanna (2016). <